Daily Archives: November 26, 2012

Reading these news articles that slam more and more nails into the (perhaps unfairly) already-dead reputation of Hewlett Packard executive Meg Whitman, I keep thinking: what if she’d won her election a couple years ago and was now governor or senator or whatever she was running for? Then nobody would care that her company was [...]

CarbonVisuals [carbonvisuals.com] is the "world leader" visualizing carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases. Accordingly, CarbonVisuals have already developed several visualizations that aim to make such emissions feel more real, and in ...

This is an issue that has bugged me for years, and I've finally found a good solution on osxdaily and Stack Overflow. I'm using Terminal on my OSX laptop to connect to a headless Linux machine over SSH, and I want to copy the output from a command (on ...

Depending on where you land in the political spectrum you may either love or despise Fox News. But regardless of your political affiliation, you have to recognize that their statisticians are well-trained in the art of using graphics to persuade … Continue reading →

“Ethics and Statistics” is descriptive but boring. It sounds like the textbook for a course which, unfortunately, nobody will take. “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is too unoriginal. “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal With Statistics” is kind of ok, maybe? “Statistical Dilemmas”: maybe a bit too boring as well. “Knaves and Frauds of Statistics, [...]

Performance analysis of an example portfolio. The portfolio We explore a particular portfolio during 2007. It invests in S&P 500 stocks and starts the year with a value of $10 million. Initially there are 50 names in the portfolio. It also ends the year with 50 names but has up to 53 names during the … Continue reading →

Measuring the effect of a binary treatment on a measured outcome is one of the most common tasks in applied statistics. Examples of these applications abound, like the effect of smoking on health, or the effect of low birth weight on cognitive development. In an ideal world we would like to be able to assign […]

The visual representation of data has gone through a number of phases, with its goals switching back and forth between analysis and presentation over time. Many introductions to visualization tend to portray historical examples as all being done for the same purpose. That, I argue in this short, incomplete, and cherry-picked history, is not true. Early to Mid–1800s: Playfair, Nightingale, Snow, Minard The first uses of graphics to represent data,…

Mathematics teachers as Careers advisors What can you do if you are good at mathematics? Become a maths teacher, of course! I wonder how many of our students are aware of what wonderful and exciting career opportunities are out there … Continue reading →